When she’s not travelling for intensive workshops, New Delhi-based Theta-Healing practitioner Shalin Kaintal Khurana conducts several sessions a day with her 300-odd clients—one of whom is me.

She was recommended to me a year ago, when I had been trying hard to fall out of love with a serial cheater.

ThetaHealing is, Kaintal says, a “core genetic, history and soul-level healing, changing beliefs using the theta brainwave which is a meditative state itself. And it’s magical, because your beliefs are changed instantly. So the potential to heal is also instant.”

In deep dreaming, your brain produces very slow delta waves. Healing modalities like pranic healing and Reiki take place at the alpha frequency. When you’re juggling what to cook for dinner with a work call and an errand, you’re producing between 14-28 beta brainwave cycles per second.

The theta state exists in between delta and alpha: for example, in the precious moments between sleep and waking, feeling at one with nature on a trek, or even when children are engrossed in their video games. It is also the state yogis use to achieve a tranquil mind. And ThetaHealing’s advocates believe you can use this wavelength to save your marriage, make a success of a career, break a bad pattern like smoking or heal an ulcer.

Reprogramming

ThetaHealing professes to harness transformational energies, within and around us, to heal by doing ‘digging work’ on your ‘top beliefs’. These are the more superficial projections of inner issues like phobias, complexes or insecurities that can also manifest as physical illness.

In ThetaHealing, you express your beliefs and feelings to your healer in a psychiatry-style question-and-answer session, till your root belief is unveiled. Common among Kaintal’s women clients are issues involving a desire for more, like feeling a lack in career or love, which stems from beliefs of being unworthy or alone, or being punished by god. “This belief is the one we want to replace,” she says.

The healer then asks your permission to change your beliefs, and ‘downloads’ positive beliefs to replace the negative ones. This is preceded and followed by a series of kinesiology tests that are meant to determine whether your beliefs have been changed.

In every one of my sessions as a Theta newbie, I can’t say I felt a change. But months later I wonder: Would I have come this far without Theta? Perhaps. Would I have come this far this fast, without Theta? For me, unlikely.

“ThetaHealing is a reprogramming of your belief structures,” Kaintal explains. “The beliefs are changed instantly. Then it’s about how willing you are to let go and receive the change, because many of us want great success but don’t feel prepared for it if it came tomorrow. Essentially, we are afraid of our own desires.”

Grey Matter

ThetaHealing was founded, developed and branded by naturopath, massage therapist and intuitive reader Vianna Stibal in the late ’90s, when she felt that her style of readings led to all manner of healing. It’s now being taught to hundreds of followers in over 28 countries. Kaintal trains under Stibal, and has been a healer for five-and-a-half years. Stibal says ThetaHealing cured her cancer, but critics have accused the therapy of making claims without scientific proof. Her practitioners aren’t deterred. “I’ve seen my own tumour disappear,” Kaintal says. “You can’t quantify miracles as big or small, but they’re all around us. I’ve been listening to one story of transformation after another every day for six years.”